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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25057660">boiling point</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/theredtailedhawkwithjewelsforeyes/pseuds/theredtailedhawkwithjewelsforeyes'>theredtailedhawkwithjewelsforeyes</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>states of matter [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Disordered Eating, Fever, Hallucinations, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Look Things Are Tough For Him Right Now Okay, Stream of Consciousness, Suicidal Ideation, will's brain really DO be boiling in his skull</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 00:48:58</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,793</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25057660</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/theredtailedhawkwithjewelsforeyes/pseuds/theredtailedhawkwithjewelsforeyes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannibal asks how he’s been sleeping. </p><p>Will says: “I haven’t.” </p><p>Will says: “I’m sleeping right now, aren’t I?” </p><p>Will says: “Like the fucking dead, Doctor Lector,” and he doesn’t even laugh, even though it really is funny. </p><p>-</p><p>Or: things have been difficult lately.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>states of matter [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1827493</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>111</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>boiling point</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>hannibal time</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Things are… difficult. </p><p>That is to say- things have been difficult lately. Obvious things, like the sleepwalking, the way he doesn’t have to enter a crime scene to taste blood on his lips- the fucking stag, god, <em> everywhere- </em> </p><p>But the little things frighten Will the most. Forgetting to eat, yes. (That’s been a given ever since he can remember- food doesn’t really register as important to him. He imagines Hannibal’s polite horror, if Will were ever to mention that at one of their conversations. “Draw a clock,” he’d say- “Mark down dinner-time, Will, if you please,” and then Will would tell him that actually he doesn’t eat dinner, actually his stomach is a series of knots tied one on top of the other, <em> actually- </em> he’d tell him that even his fancy gourmet meals with wine that costs more than his mortgage taste like dust in his mouth, or copper. Like every time he bites it’s like puncturing a jugular.)</p><p>So forgetting to eat, fine, but forgetting to feed his dogs- forgetting, rather, if he <em> has </em> fed his dogs, a frustrated series of black sharpie lines on the back of his hand to say <em> yes </em>, you’ve taken care of them, yes- but they blur together, those damn sharpie lines, and he forgets if he made them today or yesterday and even wonders once, hysterically, if they’re really on his hand at all or if that’s just another thing he’s seeing. </p><p>Things are difficult. That is to say he’s falling apart, bursting rapidly at all his seams, a sweaty nervous fucking <em> wreck </em>- and he has always been, by nature, terrified, and recklessly so, but there is something so immediate about this. He can look in the mirror and see it coming, clear as day. He breaks. The mirror breaks. Here-</p><p>He’s lying on his back, coldly illuminated by moonlight- his alarm clock seems to skip between blinks. He’s so tired he feels heavy with it. His head feels like a crime scene, stuffed full of somber muttering and red string and blood.  </p><p>When Will was much younger, death seemed terribly, desperately romantic to him. </p><p>He’s never really been able to let it go, even with the ugly reality he has to face every day- the cessation, after all, is what he’d been drawn to. The inevitability. The idea that it doesn’t really matter what you do and how you do it, not really, because the end result will always be exactly the same. Romeo and Juliet will be together moments after the curtains close, because all the world’s a stage.</p><p>He should know better now, he thinks. Because he’s older, and because of his job- he sees bodies discarded like broken dolls, and there’s nothing beautiful in that, technically speaking. </p><p>The clock ticks to four am. </p><p>Dying isn’t romantic, but he thinks about it anyway- wistfully, almost, like something dangled just out of his reach. There is so much in his head it’s deafening, like standing too close to the speakers at a concert- he’s full to the brim of everyone he’s ever met. Too much empathy, they say. (He wants, often, to be left alone. He’s terrified of being left alone. He knows, with a certainty, that when he dies it will be alone. The thought is paradoxically comforting.)</p><p>He’s lying on his back, and the sun is rising outside his window. He hasn’t slept but he feels like he’s just woken from a nightmare anyway, sweat soaking his pillow and his grey t-shirt. His eyes feel burned open, and sick sourness bubbles in his stomach- when he raises his hand, he’s shaking. When he raises his hand, he’s flayed down to the bone. The mirror breaks. </p><p>-</p><p>He makes himself some coffee. Drinks the whole pot. Thinks about breakfast, feeds the dogs. Sits at his shitty kitchen table, imagines mushrooms growing up through his skin and bursting through his eyes so vividly he can taste the soil on his tongue and the blood running down his cheeks.</p><p>-</p><p>There’s a trick he tries to play on himself, often- a game where if he doesn’t look at someone’s eyes, he can pretend they’re not real. </p><p>Real people are too much for him. Real people with real lives, coffee on their breath and cat hair on their raggedy pea-coats- real people have real problems, like fear and irritation and stress, and when Will looks at them he can feel <em> everything </em>. A toothache, an argument, an email without its reply. They worm into his over-crowded head, make him forget which bits are really his. </p><p>(He’d tried to describe it, a few times, when he was younger and a little less world weary- it’s like someone moving into your house while you still live there, butting all your furniture to the side. Their bed stacks on your bed. Another bed stacks on top of that. After a while, you don’t remember whose belongings are whose. You don’t remember if it’s your house or if you’re just another guest.)</p><p>What Will knows about himself, for certain, is that he’s tired. His head hurts, often, and his skin feels too tight, like if he moves too quickly it might split. Back when he was more dramatic he’d dig fingernails and thumbtacks into the fragile skin of his wrists and upper arms and belly, for the ownership it entailed- this is my body, this is my blood, this is <em> my </em> feeling- but he’d stopped when he’d seen his first real crime scene and felt the knife heavy in his hand, sliding across his throat. After that it felt too much like giving in, and just a little bit childish. </p><p>Real people are too much for him. Crime scenes are too much for him, not that he’d ever tell Jack- it’s obvious anyway, he knows. It sounds stupid to say they don’t understand but being a killer, being ten victims, feeling yourself die again and again, feeling the gun against your head- Will knows, so intimately, what it’s like to die. He’s known it so many times, in so many bloody fucking ways. He’s been strung from rafters and gutted and peeled and ripped apart, carefully and savagely. Sometimes he looks down at himself and is surprised that he’s still walking, when he feels like his body should’ve rotted months ago. Isn’t he already buried? Look at the nail marks on the coffin lid. </p><p>(The mirror breaks.)</p><p>-</p><p>Hannibal asks how he’s been sleeping. </p><p>Will says: “I haven’t.” </p><p>Will says: “I’m sleeping right now, aren’t I?” </p><p>Will says: “Like the fucking dead, Doctor Lector,” and he doesn’t even laugh, even though it really <em> is </em> funny. </p><p>-</p><p>Crime scenes make his stomach turn. </p><p>Crime scenes, actually, make Beverly’s stomach turn. She’s quiet about it but Will can tell by the way she holds herself that she’s just as unnerved as everybody else, and her stomach flips, and she hates that she can’t help but break these bodies down into parts before they’re even on her table. She feels like it strips them of their dignity, somehow. Will wants to reassure her that it’s a hard job and eventually you have to either get used to it or shatter into jagged little bits like him, but he knows the expression she’d wear- something unsettled, something a little pitying- so he doesn’t. </p><p>Jack has long since stopped seeing bodies as people, but there are some scenes that make even him pause. Beverly’s techs- he should know their names, really, he’s worked with them long enough-</p><p>(Although he doesn’t really know a lot of names, when he thinks about it. Jack, Alana, Beverly. Hannibal. His dogs. His optometrist, in a peripheral sort of way, because he doesn’t talk and doesn’t make Will look him in the eyes, and he likes people like that. Freddie Lounds, because she gives him a pit of angry anxiety in his stomach that’s all his own, which would be nice if it wasn’t so sour.)</p><p>-they’re shaken, usually, but they make jokes to cover it up. They don’t like Will, probably because he doesn’t know their names and thinks of them as a set and doesn’t make eye contact unless Jack forces him to, like a sullen toddler. Probably because he keeps breathing in killers and borrowing their minds. Probably because he fucked up the evidence by grabbing the knife. Probably because they think he’s crazy, which is getting harder and harder to dispute. </p><p>He got blood on the crime scene. It’s funny to him because he made the crime scene, of course, when he carved away her mask- but that wasn’t <em> really </em> her, you understand- and he also bled out on the floor, grinning falsely long after his heart stopped. It’s funny that they’re angry with him because he added to it, even though he created it. It’s like getting angry at an artist for painting, he thinks, and he says it, and Jack isn’t really listening but he tells Will to go home, for god’s sake, you look like shit- </p><p>He doesn’t go home. He goes to Doctor Lecter’s. Or-</p><p>He doesn’t go home, even though he means to go home- he blinks and he’s in Hannibal’s waiting room. He blinks again and he’s inside. He feels like a deflated water balloon, all stretched out skin and leaking insides- he feels like he’s melting into a puddle all over Hannibal’s fancy carpet- he thinks, wildly, that that’s not the worst thing he’s had on the carpet, but that doesn’t really make sense, of course, and so he closes his eyes- </p><p>Hannibal says it might be mental. Will just wants it to stop. </p><p>-</p><p>Things are difficult. He longs, sharply, to go to the river and sit in the cool water and breathe it in. He wants to be a fish. Is that crazy? He wants to be a fish. He wants to turn himself inside out. Is he dead or alive? </p><p>His doctor is dead- not Lecter, of course, the other one, the one who was lying. His face was split at the seams. Will had been barefoot when he found him, or barefoot when he killed him. One of the two. He goes home. Properly, this time. He blinks. </p><p>The mirror breaks. </p><p>He takes a shard and holds it to his arteries. His jugular, his thighs. In the mirror he sees himself, bleeding- he licks his lips and tastes the great tear in them, bisecting his face-</p><p>There’s a stag in front of him. It bows its head, and he bows back, and it impales him so suddenly he hardly has time to scream. </p><p>He wakes up in bed. </p><p>Has he fed the dogs? There’s a black sharpie line on his hand, but he should do it again. Just to be safe.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>a problem i realized early on in the process of thinking abt writing this is that i am simply too stupid to write will graham, but i decided to make that everyone else's problem instead of mine so i hope you enjoy </p><p>if u liked this please leave a comment or send me an ask at redjewelsforeyes.tumblr.com</p></blockquote></div></div>
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